Man suffers, not only personally, but there is immense suffering of man. It is a thing that is pervading the universe. Man has suffered — physically, psychologically, spiritually — for centuries upon centuries. The mother cries because her son is killed. The wife cries because her husband is being brutally mutilated in a war. There is tremendous suffering in the world. I don’t think people are aware, or even feel, this immense sorrow, that is in the world. They are so concerned with their own personal sorrow that they overlook the sorrow of a poor man in a little village in India or in China or in the eastern world, who will never have a full meal, clean clothes, a comfortable bed. And there is this sorrow of thousands of people being killed in war, or in the totalitarian world, millions being executed for ideologies. Tyranny. The terror of all that. So there is all this sorrow in the world. And there is also the personal sorrow. And, without really understanding it, very deeply, and resolving it, passion won’t come out of sorrow. And without passion, how can you see beauty? You can intellectually appreciate a painting, or a poem, or a statue, but you need this great sense of inward bursting of passion, exploding of passion. That creates in itself the sensitivity that can see beauty. So I think it is rather important to understand sorrow. I think it goes in this order — sorrow, passion, beauty.

In the Christian world, if I am not mistaken, sorrow is delegated to a person, and through that person, we somehow escape from sorrow, or we hope to escape from sorrow. In the eastern world, sorrow is rationalized through the statement of karma: what you have done in the past, you pay for in the present. So there are these two categories of escapes. And there are a thousand escapes — whiskey, drugs, sex, going off to attend the Mass. Man has never stayed with a thing. He has always either sought comfort in a belief, in an action, in identification with something greater than himself, but he has never said, look, I must see what this is. I must penetrate it, and not delegate it to someone else. I must go into it, I must face it, I must look at it, I must know what it is. So, when the mind doesn’t escape from this sorrow, either personal or the sorrow of man, if you don’t escape from it or rationalize or try to go beyond or you are not frightened of it, you remain with it. Any movement away from what is is a dissipation of energy. It prevents you understanding what is. What is is sorrow. We have means, and ways, and cunning developments of escapes. But if there is no escape whatsoever, then you remain with it. In everyone’s life, there is an incident which brings you tremendous sorrow. A happening. It might be an incident, a word, an accident, a shattering sense of absolute loneliness. These things happen. And with that comes this sense of utter sorrow. When the mind can remain with that — not move away from it — out of that comes passion. Not the cultivated passion, but the movement of passion, born of non-withdrawal from sorrow.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti, San Diego, 1974